Techstrong News Recap – July 11, 2022

Hi, I'm Natan Solomon. Today's July 11th. And here the headlines first.

Google will pay us app developers 90 million dollars in a settlement over App Store policies the settlement punishes Google for the anti-competitive restrictions. It placed on app makers on its Google Play Store. In a blog post Google announced that many US app developers who earned Revenue through Google Play will be able to receive money from the fund.

The deal was aimed at benefiting small app makers for many years. There has been a struggle between app developers and big corporations regarding the cut companies like Apple and Google take out of their revenue. Under the recent settlement.

Google said it would continue a pricing model established last year, which allows us app developers to pay a lower fee of 15% for the first million dollars in Revenue. next the tech giant met a platforms has slashed its hiring plans as it braces for a deep economic downturn. Originally metaplaned on hiring 10,000 new engineers in 2022, but they've decided to cut hirings by at least 30% CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted that this might be one of the worst downturns.

We've seen in recent history. in addition to reducing hirings the company plans on leaving certain positions unfilled and turning up the heat on Performance Management to weed out weaker employees Zuckerberg even went as far as to say that there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be tech companies across the industry should have been forced to scale back in recent months. And with the world's largest social media company losing half of its market value this year.

It's no surprise meta is bracing for the worst. In other news a new report commissioned by the Pentagon concluded that the blockchain is not decentralized is vulnerable to attacks and is running outdated software. The shocking report uncovered that certain users can potentially have excessive and centralized control over the entire blockchain system.

The pentagon's research arm commissioned trail of bits a security research organization to investigate the blockchain excited to focus on the two leading cryptocurrencies in the global market, but Bitcoin and ethereum the findings show cause for concern as it only takes four entities to disrupt Bitcoin and two for ethereum. It also found that 60% of all block Bitcoin traffic moves through just three isps along with outdated and unencrypted software and blockchain protocols. Recently cryptocurrencies have been in a full meltdown with billions of dollars being lost by investors.

Although the recent downturn has come from a struggling global economy supply chain problems and inflation the pentagon's findings add yet another layer of uncertainty. In another piece of concerning news. There may be an All-Star ransomware gang made up of former conti and revel members the new gang that goes by the name black Boston has victimized 50 organizations in the US UK Australia, New Zealand and Canada since its formation in April 2022.

The ransomware employed by blackbosa is the first of its kind and uses double extortion tactics according to cyber reason. The gang steals the files of a victim organization and then threatens to publish the stolen files if their demands are not met. The group is allegedly demanded millions of dollars from their victims to keep the stolen data private.

As ransomware gangs such as black bosta continue to rise employing. The zero trust architecture is imperative to preventing these types of attacks. It's also been found that ransomware gangs take advantage of vulnerabilities and outdated software items making it extremely important to keep all system patches up to date.

Next Samsung is working closely with Google and Microsoft to prevent Pegasus like cyber attacks. With a large number of state-level cyber attacks being launched the three Tech Giants will work to create preventative measures. All those security measures are in place that prevent fishing attacks highly sophisticated spyware tools can break into devices without the victim even pressing a button.

Such possibilities have even forced Apple to introduce a lockdown mode which can prevent targeted cyber attacks. It's unclear whether Samsung plans on introducing a lockdown mode, but it is working on various biometric authenticators that could replace the passwords that we've grown accustomed to. On digital cxo we have an article that analyzes any desks 2022 remote work report.

The report comes in the wake of Elon musk's decision to stop offering remote work to his employees along with critiques of the work ethic of those who operate away from the office. The findings show how remote and hybrid work is greatly benefited employees and how Enterprises are also finding it to be advantageous. However, the widespread move to remote and hybrid work has also prevented cybersecurity and virtual efficiency challenges.

The article weighs the benefits and the drawbacks and address conclusions on what companies need to do to successfully offer remote work going forward. On Security Boulevard, we have an article covering normalized a company emerging to simplify cloud data security emerging from stealth with an agentless platform normalize uses graph technology to enable it teams to discover data in the cloud classify it and identify likely attack paths for cyber criminals. 2 million in series a funding normalize the CEO a mayor Diva said the goal is to simplify cybersecurity teams is understanding of where sense of data is allowing them to better protect it.

Finally on container Journal we have an article talking about apero extending its container security platform to run time environments. This capability provides developers with a better ability to remediate vulnerabilities before AppSec are deployed for production. The platform extension will also enable developers of container-based AppSec to understand how certain risks impact the security of the code.

They're developing. And that's today's headlines.